


Between the Lightning and the Thunder

by Molly



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-01
Updated: 2010-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-11 09:56:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Molly/pseuds/Molly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Swan Song coda.  After Sam falls. <br/><em>All that summer, Dean reads signs in the sky and tries to be afraid.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Lightning and the Thunder

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: This is possibly built on slightly shaky canonical ground, but we're talking minor tremors. Not Stull Cemetery or anything. :) As usual, many wild thanks to for the quick beta.

All that summer, Dean reads signs in the sky and tries to be afraid. He tries, at least, to be wary. Sheet lightning in broad daylight out of a cloudless sky, storms that lash the streets with wind and rain and hail and don't show up on any radar, birds cartwheeling into each other in jagged, mad formations. May bleeds into June, into July, and a sodden heat pastes itself across Indiana, trapping people in their homes and offices like flies in amber. For all of August, the air sits still: no clouds, no breeze, no breath. Thunder rolls over the rooftops every night, but never brings rain.

For all of August, Dean salts every door and window of the house his brother put him in, except for one. The window sill in his own bedroom he leaves bare; he lays a line across the door to the hallway instead. He draws a devil's trap in white chalk on each side of the door, because he's careful and knows his work. But the window is _his_ window, it looks out onto Lisa's garden where bright orange day lilies grow beside pink and yellow roses. It looks across Lisa's garden toward the street where sometimes, late at night, the street lamp flickers like a candle flame.

In early September, the heat wave breaks without warning and the rains come. Torrential, deafening, battering, they wipe the world clean and bare in a single night; the wind topples trees into the streets, power lines fall and snap and bite, tornadoes roam the city like the fingers of a blindly searching hand. By morning the sun is out and the schools left standing are closed, businesses don't open their doors, public transportation is cancelled or destroyed. Lisa keeps Ben indoors, doesn't even let him out into the back yard for fear the weather will turn on them again.

"What is it?" she asks Dean, her voice barely loud enough to be called a whisper. "What's coming? Is it coming for us?"

Dean doesn't think so. He pulls the tarp off the Impala, backs her into the center of the driveway and opens her hood. There's a tool box in the trunk, and he spends an hour remembering how to use it. Remembering how to use himself. His back aches and the back of his neck turns red in the mid-day sun; he sweats through his T-shirt and strips it off, tosses it over his shoulder. When he's done he soaps her up and rubs her down, waxes her to a bright, deadly shine.

Then he pulls two duffel bags from the back, and carries them to the kitchen.

"Something's coming," Ben says at his elbow, watching him break the guns down one by one; watching him clean them and oil them and put them back together.

"Maybe." Dean can't decide if he should load them or not; his instincts say yes, but his instincts also say there's a kid by his arm watching the guns with too much interest. He settles for rock salt rounds in the shotguns and a couple of clips in his back pocket, just in case.

"Is it something bad?"

Dean looks out the window, at the empty, cloudless sky. "I don't know," he says.

But something in him knows.

By the middle of the month the buses are running again, the power is back on, the schools have reopened. Lisa keeps Ben home a week longer than most of the other parents do, looking to Dean for answers. She watches him lay down the salt, makes him teach her how to draw the symbols. She teaches Ben to draw them in bright colors and the house becomes a psychedelic anti-evil art project, sigils over every door and window.

Except for Dean's. While September ages and the leaves change their colors and fall, Dean's window stays clean and unsalted; when the heat begins to fade, it stays open.

"We can just go." Lisa sits across from him at the breakfast table, after the school bus has taken Ben away. Her hands are pale and white around a blue mug filled with the best coffee Dean's ever tasted. "Whatever's coming, we can just leave. We can hide from it."

Dean nods. He's been thinking about this, too. "There's someone I can call for you."

Castiel comes in a flurry of wings and darkness even as the words are spoken, and Dean's heart thuds in his chest at the sight of him. It's the first time he's been aware of having a heart since early summer. Castiel's face is warm and kind and sad, and Dean's eyes spill over, before even knows he's crying.

He smiles at Dean, and holds out his hand to Lisa, and says, "Come."

"Ben--"

"Ben is our next stop. Trust me."

Lisa looks at Dean; Dean nods. Lisa takes Castiel's hand. "He'll take you and Ben somewhere safe," Dean says. "Just for a while. Just till this is done."

Castiel looks into Dean's eyes. He looks like he might say something, and Dean wonders what Castiel knows, what he might reveal if Dean could ask the right questions. But before he can find any words, the world changes, and Castiel is gone.

A breeze rises as the sun sets, and Dean throws open every window, every door. He scrubs away the traps and the sigils, leaving bright blurred smudges on the ceilings and the walls. He turns on every light until the house is incandescent, until light spills out of it in a blinding, welcoming flood. He stands by his bedroom window and watches as the wind picks up and whispers through the trees, sweet and cool; watches, as along the quiet street, lights flare to life one by one.

When the light across the street begins to flicker, Dean goes into the kitchen, and then to the front door. He leaves the door open behind him, and sits down on the wooden steps, his knees aching, his feet tired, his blood singing loud and desperate in his veins. He sets two bottles on the porch on one side of him, ripe beads of cold sweat already rolling down the glass.

On the other side, he lays down the Colt. It won't be any use. But it's there.

All through summer, all through every sign, Dean has tried to worry. But the world is moving again; something has shaken loose inside it, shaken free. Something is coming. There's no fear in him, and no hope. He's scoured clean. All there is inside him is love.

He leans back on his hands, closes his eyes while the night closes in around him. He tilts his head back and listens for a familiar voice; familiar footsteps coming up the flagstone path.

He listens.

He holds his breath.

And he waits.

~  
   
Feedback welcome, as always!


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